Introduction: infrastructure as relational and experimental process

Jonathan Alderman and Geoff Goodwin

Introduction¹

In early October 2019, thousands of Ecuadorians took to the streets to protest against the IMF-sponsored austerity politics of the Moreno government. The trigger for the protest was the sudden removal of fuel subsidies, which reduced the cost of transport and the price of essential goods. In Quito, the capital, members of indigenous, student, transport, teacher and labour movements flooded the narrow streets and expansive plazas of the centro histórico and occupied public spaces throughout the city. Elsewhere in the Andes, indigenous protesters blocked the Panamericana, the undulating highway that connects Ecuador to Colombia in the north, and Peru in the south. Boulders, rocks, trees, and tyres were strewn across the road at strategic points to regulate the circulation of people, goods, and vehicles. Meanwhile, thousands of indigenous peoples from across the Andes marched along the Panamericana to Quito, before occupying El Arbolito park; close to the National Assembly – a symbolic site of state power. Faced with escalating state repression, indigenous protesters sought refuge in the Casa de la Cultura, a glittering modernist building constructed in the 1940s to promote cultural activity and forge national identity. Inside, drawing on long-established practices, the protesters formed their own assembly to deliberate and strategise. The scale and intensity of the protests forced the Moreno government to backdown, reinstate the fuel subsidies, and enter into dialogue with representatives of social movements. Yet the protest came at terrible human cost, with state violence leaving at least eleven protesters dead and thousands more injured.

Similar scenes unfolded across Latin America in late 2019 as waves of protests brought the decade to a tumultuous close. The causes, sites, and tactics of these mobilisations were multiple, as were the actors involved. Yet they revealed a crucial point: the centrality of infrastructure to the social and political life of Latin America. Taking this as a point of departure, this volume analyses the social and political dimensions of a wide range of Latin American infrastructures, from a crumbling nuclear plant in Cuba to a sparkling tram network in Ecuador. In doing so, it makes a unique contribution to the cross-disciplinary infrastructure literature and the multidisciplinary field of Latin American studies. In this introductory chapter, we tie together the main empirical and theoretical threads of the book and weave them into this literature. We identify three core themes that cut across the volume and connect it to the existing scholarship: i) nation, state, citizenship ii) development, promise, progress, and iii) disappointment, failure, decay. We argue that insights related to these three broad themes provide support for conceptualising infrastructure as a relational and experimental process. Our conceptual approach builds explicitly on the working definition of infrastructures elaborated by Harvey et al. (2017, p. 5): ‘material assemblages that generate effects and structure social relations, either through engineered (i.e. planned and purposefully crafted) or non-engineered (i.e. unplanned and emergent) activities’. Hence, infrastructures have relational and experimental qualities and are better understood as open-ended processes rather than static and stable configurations. This suggests analytical attention should not only be paid to the plans, designs, and materiality of infrastructures but also to the diverse effects and relations they generate. Conceptualising infrastructure as a relational and experimental process therefore draws attention to the temporal and historical dimensions of infrastructure. While this book focuses on infrastructures in the 20th and 21st centuries, we situate them within a longer historical arc, including the period of colonial-capitalist expansion, which commenced in Latin America in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Thus, Latin American infrastructures are connected to long-run historical processes of accumulation, commodification, and colonialism and these processes weigh heavily on contemporary dynamics. Infrastructures have also been at the centre of resistance to these processes, including socialist struggles to challenge global capitalist structures and relations and indigenous efforts to resist colonial-capitalist development. The chapters in this volume provide important new insights into these issues and demonstrate the analytical value of exploring social and political change through infrastructure.

In the remainder of this introduction, we further explicate the conceptual case for viewing infrastructure as a relational and experimental process, before considering the specificity of Latin American infrastructures, and discussing the book’s three core themes in greater detail: i) nation, state, citizenship ii) development, promise, progress, and iii) disappointment, failure, decay. The chapter concludes by signalling the wider contributions this volume makes to Latin American studies scholarship.

Infrastructure as relational and experimental process

The wave of protests that swept across Latin America at the end of the 2010s indicates the relational and experimental nature of infrastructure. Roads, for example, are not only used to circulate and connect but also to disrupt and immobilise. Blocking roads offers protesters the opportunity to derail daily life, bring visibility to their struggles, and interrupt processes of commodification and accumulation. Dependence on markets for the provisioning of essential goods makes Latin American towns and cities particularly vulnerable to blockades. Roads connect urban consumers to national and international markets and help stack the shelves of shops and supermarkets. While their role in this process often goes unnoticed, during protests they are thrust into the forefront of everyday life and their operation (or lack thereof) becomes an urgent social and political concern. Blockades therefore not only bring visibility to the grievances and demands of protesters but also to the social and political life of Latin American infrastructures (Star, 1999; Anand, 2020; Colven, 2020).

The visibility of infrastructure relates to its unpredictability and rebelliousness. Rather than evolving along the paths envisioned by politicians, engineers, and planners, infrastructures often travel in surprising directions and generate unexpected social, political, and environmental effects (Harvey 2017 et al.; Anand, 2017; Gupta, 2018; Goodwin, 2018). Multiple factors explain this. First, infrastructures are not only made by planners and engineers but also by the people who use and occupy them. Hence, there are always ‘non-engineered’ and ‘emergent’ dimensions to infrastructure that politicians, engineers, and planners cannot fully control (Harvey et al., 2017, pp. 13–14). Take, for example, public plazas, one of the defining features of Latin American towns and cities. Built to promote civic engagement and religious obedience, protesters routinely use them to contest citizenship and challenge religious authorities. Equally, the steps of a private bank might be constructed to allow access to customers and employees and convey a sense of security and prestige, but they are also sporadically used by skateboarders, who hurl along them, shattering the orderly visions of corporate planners in the process. Infrastructures are therefore contested spaces where different meanings and practices collide and interact. The unpredictability of infrastructure is accentuated by its recursive or dialectic qualities: infrastructure generates economic, social, political, and ecological effects, which feed back to reconfigure infrastructure in a continuous cycle of undetermined change (Harvey, 2017 et al.). The complex web of relations that are established through infrastructures are impossible to predetermine, being ‘subject to experimentation’ (Harvey et al., 2017, p. 12; see also, Anand, 2017; Gupta, 2018). This cautions against drawing simple lines between cause and effect, especially since infrastructural effects are not spatially or temporally bounded.

This process can bring into being ‘new practical ontologies’ or ‘new configurations of the world’ (Jensen and Morita, 2017, p. 618; see also Barua, 2021). Infrastructures thereby have the potential to reconfigure what is regarded as ‘natural’ or ‘social’ in a particular setting. Indeed, Escobar (2017) argues that ontology is inherent in the design process: ‘every tool or technology is ontological in the sense that, however humbly or minutely, it inaugurates a set of rituals, ways of doing, and modes of being’, thus ‘in designing tools, we (humans) design the conditions for our existence and, in turn the conditions of our designing. We design tools and these tools design us back’ (Escobar, 2017, p. 110; see also Stengers, 2010). This draws critical attention to the actors involved in the design of infrastructure and their epistemological, ontological, and ideological proclivities (Harvey and Knox, 2015; Appel et al., 2018; Bear, 2020). Much infrastructure in Latin America, for example, is based on dualist modernist ontologies which dichotomise ‘nature’ and ‘society’, and infrastructures designed along these lines promote this separation. This can create tensions when infrastructures are introduced in settings where divergent ontologies (co)exist. Thus, infrastructures are a key domain of ontological and pluriversal politics (de la Cadena, 2010, 2015; Bennison, 2016; Escobar, 2017, 2020; Tym, 2020).

Conceptualising infrastructures as seditious and experimental draws attention to infrastructural cracks and splinters (Graham and Marvin, 2001). While gaps within and between Latin American infrastructures have always been evident (e.g. Bennett, 1998; Swyngedouw, 1997), they have expanded and multiplied since the early 1980s as public investment has declined and private firms have taken a more central role in funding and operating infrastructure (World Bank, 1994; Wilson, 2004; Harvey et al., 2017; Appel et al., 2018). Headline figures indicate this general trend: public infrastructure investment in Latin America dropped from 3 per cent of GDP in the early 1980s to less than 1 per cent in the early 2000s, while private investment increased from 0.5 per cent to 1.5 per cent during the same period (CEPAL 2016, p. 5).2 This downward trend in public investment was reversed in the late 2000s as some Latin American governments took advantage of favourable economic conditions to restore or construct infrastructure. This proved short-lived, however, as the end of the commodity boom, the Odebrecht corruption scandal, and increased economic and political instability negatively impacted public infrastructure investment across the region.3

The splintering of Latin American infrastructure since the 1980s has been associated with deterioration, as public services and infrastructures have been run down or transferred to private firms to manage (Appel et al., 2018). Heightened reliance on the private sector has increased space for multinational corporations to develop and operate Latin American infrastructure, while financialisation has converted it into a ‘global asset class’ (Bear, 2020; see also Loftus et al., 2019; Pryke and Allen, 2019).4 Infrastructure therefore not only supports the circulation and expansion of capital within Latin America but also the flow of capital out of Latin America. In doing so, it can cement global centre-periphery structures and relations (Prebisch, 1950; dos Santos, 1970). While global neoliberal restructuring has facilitated outflows of capital from Latin America (Harvey 2003), this has been a prominent feature of capitalism for centuries, as Galeano’s famous metaphor of the ‘open veins’ of Latin America graphically depicts (Galeano, 1973/1997). Yet, as we have already suggested, infrastructure does not always bolster capitalist relations and processes, and, as the recent wave of protests in Latin America have shown, it can also be used to subvert accumulation and commodification and support non-capitalist practices and relations (Bravo Díaz, 2020; Humeres, 2021 see also Juris, 2012; von Schnitzler, 2016; Khalili, 2021).

The recent plundering of Latin American infrastructure for profit has reduced the amount of funds available for its maintenance and development. However, the fragmentation and erosion of Latin American infrastructures and the neoliberal restructuring of capitalist states have also created opportunities for rural and urban communities to take greater collective control of infrastructures and reconfigure political relations and practices (Goodwin, 2019, 2021). Hence, cracks within and between infrastructure can sometimes be generative (Harvey et al., 2017). The absence of infrastructure can also have interesting political effects. Roads are potent protest infrastructures in the Andes partly because of the lack of alternative transport infrastructure. In Ecuador and Bolivia, for example, national train networks, which were central to post-independence nation-building in both countries, deteriorated in the 1970s and 1980s, ultimately making towns and cities more reliant on roads for supplies of essential items and hence more vulnerable to blockades. The lack or collapse of infrastructure, as Butler (2016) notes, is also frequently a source of protest and resistance as people mobilise collectively to improve their living conditions. Thus, infrastructural absence and degradation can shape political relations and practices in unexpected ways (Anand et al., 2018; Budds et al., 2020).

The experimental nature of infrastructure and the diverse relations and effects it generates reveals infrastructure as a process, not a temporally bounded static configuration. Gupta (2018) notes that the mainstream view of infrastructure as starting with planning and ending with inauguration fails to capture the temporality and complexity of infrastructure. The fact that much infrastructure is never officially inaugurated further unsettles such linear views of infrastructure development. Indeed, according to Carse and Kneas (2019, p. 9), ‘planned, blocked, delayed or abandoned projects are ubiquitous – the norm, rather than the exception’. Infrastructure, then, is never really finished and is effectively ‘always in-the-making’ (Silva-Novoa Sánchez et al., 2019). Once an irrigation network is built, for example, new relations and practices emerge which feedback to modify the network in a continuous dialectical process of change. The various material components of the system – canals, pipes, dams, levers, pumps, switches – require maintenance and, ultimately, replacement. This requires mobilising labour, finance, materials, and knowledge and some form of collective organisation and decision-making (Boelens and Vos, 2014; Anand, 2020). The periodic maintenance and replacement of irrigation infrastructure is accompanied by micro, barely perceptible, modifications that peasants and farmers make to the network to improve or alter the distribution of water, keeping check with changing hydrological and climatic conditions, which themselves are in a constant state of flux. Irrigation infrastructure is therefore reshaped through individual and collective human actions at different scales and temporalities. To add to this complexity, it is also modified by non-human forms of agency (Strang, 2016; Harvey et al., 2017; see also Scarborough, 2014). Water corrodes and buffets canals, pipes, and dams, while the plants and animals that surround and penetrate the network reshape it in multiple ways (Anand, 2017; see also Jensen, 2017; Barua, 2021). Hence, infrastructures are constantly evolving and their effects ripple through human and non-human worlds.

The specificity of Latin American infrastructures

Viewing infrastructure as culturally and environmentally embedded implies that the same material assemblages will generate diverse effects and relations and take alternative meanings in different settings (Pfaffenberger, 1992). This is especially true in Latin America, one of the most socially and geographically diverse regions in the world (Allmark, 1997). Yet there are some common factors that have shaped Latin American infrastructures and distinguished them from infrastructures elsewhere in the world. In this section, we discuss factors related to three broad and overlapping themes – i) colonialism/imperialism ii) economy/society and iii) environment/space.

First, the timing and pattern of European colonialism left a significant mark on Latin American infrastructures. New technologies, rationalities, and ontologies were introduced from the 15th and 16th centuries as the region was slowly and unevenly incorporated into European empires. The uneven pattern of colonialism and the widespread resistance of indigenous peoples ensured that existing technologies, rationalities, and ontologies were not extinguished. Indigenous infrastructures, including elaborate irrigation systems constructed by the Aztec, Maya, Huari, Tiahuanaco, and Inca empires, provided the foundation for infrastructures developed during the period of European colonial rule, and continue to underpin much infrastructure today (Galeano 1973/1997; Sherbondy, 1993; Scarborough, 1994; Harvey and Knox, 2015). Foreign intervention continued after most Latin American countries gained independence in the early 19th century as imperial powers, especially Britain and the United States, vied for political-economic control of the region. British influence was particularly strong in the 19th century as British capital, engineers, and machinery poured into Latin America and reconfigured the region’s infrastructure (Stone, 1968; Errázuriz and Giucci, 2016; Guajardo Soto, 2021, 2022). Meanwhile, viewing Latin America as its ‘backyard’, US politicians, planners, and bureaucracies were especially active in restructuring Latin American societies and environments through infrastructure in the 20th century, with the Panama Canal perhaps the most striking example (Carse, 2014; Villanueva, 2020).5 The Cold War, which had distinct Latin American characteristics (Booth, 2021), left a huge infrastructural footprint in the region (Chastain and Lorek, 2020), not least through investment and programmes linked to the Alliance for Progress (Rabe, 1999). Soviet involvement in the development of Latin American infrastructure was much less prominent during the Cold War, but still left its mark, not least in Cuba (Blasier, 2002). More recently, China has become a central actor in infrastructure development in Latin America, including financing and constructing multiple mining, oil, transport, and energy infrastructures in the Andes and Amazon (Chauvet et al., 2020). The intervention of Western European and North American powers in Latin America has left enduring epistemological and ontological legacies as ‘cognitive empires’ have shaped how infrastructures have been demanded, conceived, and received (Santos, 2018; see also Quijano, 2008; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010/2020). Hence, Latin America’s long and diverse histories of colonialism and imperialism continue to weigh heavily on the region’s infrastructures. However, as recent scholarship has shown (e.g. Thurner, 2019; Chastain and Lorek, 2020), Latin America has not been a passive receiver of foreign science and expertise, but has actively contributed to the development of global knowledge related to technology and infrastructure. Thus, Latin America is an important epistemic site and this is reflected in its infrastructures.

Second, Latin America’s early incorporation into the capitalist world economy through colonialism involved constructing the infrastructures required to produce and export minerals, fuels, and agriculture (Galeano, 1973/1997). These historical infrastructures, which underpinned early capitalist development in Europe, continue to dissect and configure Latin American societies, while more recent infrastructures have deepened the insertion of Latin American countries into global production and distribution networks, including those for illicit commodities, like cocaine (Grisaffi, 2019; Gutiérrez and Ciro, 2022). Dependency on the export of primary goods, which remains the defining macro feature of most Latin American economies, imbues the region’s infrastructure with greater uncertainty and instability as public and private investment are closely linked to volatile cycles in world commodity markets (Acosta, 2009; Svampa, 2012). Specialisation in primary export production and the enduring legacies of colonialism have contributed to making Latin America the most unequal region in the world (Sánchez-Ancochea, 2020), with huge disparities in income and wealth reflected in infrastructures that often segregate and exclude rather than unite and include. Gaping class differences overlap and intersect with entrenched racial and ethnic inequalities and discrimination and Latin American infrastructure can both cement and alter class and race relations. These processes have deep historical roots in Latin America. For example, following the Toledan reforms that forcibly moved indigenous populations from their communities in the late 16th century, colonial towns were constructed as infrastructures of governance that organised space along racial divisions that endure today. Ethnic and racial diversity has also brought vibrancy to Latin American infrastructure as indigenous peoples and Afro Latinos have drawn on ancestral traditions to refashion and forge infrastructures (Escobar, 2020).

Third, Latin American environments and geographies are highly diverse, presenting multiple challenges to designers and users of infrastructure (Allmark, 1997; Coletta and Raftopoulos, 2016). This contributes to the incompleteness, fragmentation, and decay of infrastructures in the region. At the same time, infrastructures have reconfigured and pummelled Latin American ecosystems, from mangroves dotted along the Pacific coast to páramos perched high in the Andes. Indigenous peoples have often been the most severely impacted by the restructuring of habitats and environments through infrastructure, especially in the Amazonian region, which has seen massive socio-environmental destruction since the early 20th century, in particular (Orta-Martínez and Finer, 2010; Bebbington et al., 2020; Ioris, 2021). In these cases, infrastructures have often been a form of ‘slow violence’ as the socio-environmental damage that they generate has emerged gradually, sometimes, barely detectably (Nixon, 2011). Meanwhile, urbanisation has unfolded at breakneck speed across Latin America since the early 20th century and swathes of agricultural and pastoral land have been converted into towns and cities, transforming built and natural environments and human-nature relations in the process. Viewed as engines of development, cities have increasingly been seen to represent Latin America’s future(s) and infrastructures have been planned and constructed to attempt to realise these modernising visions. Spatial inequalities have deepened as Latin American states have prioritised urban over rural infrastructures and populations. Water has been redirected to quench the thirst of ever-expanding urban populations (Swyngedouw, 1997), while mega-dams have been constructed to bring electricity to towns and cities (Purcell, 2020). The diverse Latin American cities that have emerged out of these processes are sites of vibrancy and hope, on the one hand, and poverty and segregation, on the other. The ‘auto-construction’ of low-income neighbourhoods has created space for the emergence of new political practices and relations, while the development of high-income gated communities has generated new forms of exclusion and inequality (Amin, 2014; Maclean, 2015; Zeiderman, 2016; Perry, 2016; Geraghty and Massidda, 2019; Massidda, 2018, 2021; Gyger, 2019; Boulos, 2021). Today, over 80 per cent of Latin Americans are estimated to live in urban areas, making the region one of the most urbanised in the world.

In diverse ways, the chapters in this volume show how the above factors have shaped Latin American infrastructures and given them distinct characteristics. In the following sections, we outline the three broad themes that cut across the book and literature – i) nation, state, citizenship ii) development, promise, progress iii) disappointment, failure, decay – and explain how the chapters further advance understanding of these issues.

Nation, state, citizenship

Infrastructure is frequently a state project (Scott 1998), though as we shall see across several chapters in this book, the lines between state, public, private, community, national, and international infrastructure are often blurred. Demand for infrastructure often originates from below, from citizens themselves; however, it is generally the state that has the resources and expertise to coordinate and construct large infrastructure projects, even if the construction itself is often undertaken by private companies and/or infrastructure users (Holston, 2008; Deavila Pertuz, 2019; Gyger, 2019; Goodwin, 2019, 2021). Infrastructure therefore mediates relations between states and citizens, and acts as a tool of governmentality, enabling states to act on citizens, shaping them in particular ways (Foucault, 2008; Larkin, 2018, p. 182). Indeed, infrastructure has been described as a ‘technology of liberal rule’ (Appel et al., 2018, p. 4). Liberalism applies supposedly universal principles to treat citizens as equals. However, in the real world, the decisions made by governments professing ‘liberal’ values do not depart from a neutral value-less position, where decisions are made behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ free of personal and collective prejudices (Rawls, 1999), as the so-called communitarian critics of liberal philosopher John Rawls rightly point out (Mulhall and Swift, 1992). Liberal governance always guarantees equal citizenship, liberty, and access to goods under the preconditions set from the epistemological perspective of the more powerful. The outcome is highly differentiated forms of citizenship in which different classes and groups have different levels of rights and privileges (Larson, 2004; Holston, 2008; Lazar, 2013; Nuijten, 2013; Anand, 2017).

This is particularly evident in Latin America, where state formation has been heavily influenced by European colonisation. Indeed, it could be argued that ‘Latin American states were co-produced along with infrastructure’ (Velho and Ureta, 2019, p. 430) that was originally designed to exploit native resources but leave none of the profits with native people. While Latin American states obtained independence from their respective colonisers in the 19th century, they became what Quijano has called ‘independent states of colonial societies’, marked by persisting internal colonialism, or ‘coloniality’ (Quijano, 2008, p. 123), developing alongside and through infrastructural construction. Socially, many Latin American states contain large indigenous populations. Politically, however, indigenous demands, epistemologies and ontologies have been largely ignored by Latin American states. Even in Bolivia, where Evo Morales is widely perceived to have been the country’s first indigenous president when he was elected in 2005, and where one of the slogans of his government’s programmes vivir bien was based on indigenous notions of living well within rural Andean communities, proposals for infrastructure construction led to high-profile conflicts between the state and indigenous peoples. One source of tension in these struggles was the right of indigenous peoples to be consulted over state projects that infringed their collective rights, which is enshrined in International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169. The efforts of indigenous communities and movements to use consultations as a tool to influence the design and implementation of large-scale infrastructure projects in Bolivia were frustrated by the centralised decision-making processes of the Morales governments. While the conditions for the failures of the 20th-century high-modernist schemes that Scott (1998) documents were not present in 21st-century Bolivia, large-scale infrastructure projects under Morales were infused with a similar ‘muscle-bound’ belief in scientific knowledge and linear progress (see also Escobar, 2010; Hope, 2021).

Hence, 200 years after independence, ‘capitalist Euro modernity’ is still taken as the model for the design of much Latin American infrastructure (Escobar, 2020). The contributors to this volume shine new light on this issue. In Sam Rumé’s chapter, for example, we see that in Ecuador, another country where indigenous epistemologies and ontologies have been explicitly projected through state discourse in the form of buen vivir or sumak kawsay (Martínez Novo, 2014), a new tram network whose original motivation included the reproduction of a heritage aesthetic evolved into one explicitly modelled on modern European transportation, of propelling citizens in the Andean city of Cuenca towards a European modernity. The dominance of Eurocentric best practices in the design and construction of the tram network, which finally started operating in 2020, leads him to ask whether the advances imagined by the tramway could be seen as perpetuating ‘colonial cultures of planning’.

Through studying infrastructures, we can glimpse the political rationality behind them (Larkin, 2013, p. 328). The values of the dominant culture are reproduced by engineers and architects and embedded in the infrastructure that people use; in order to access and take advantage of this infrastructure its users often reproduce the dominant values themselves (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Foucault, 2008). In her chapter, Julie Dayot shows how values evolve among an indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon when the municipality charges the inhabitants for access to water through a new drinking water plant, which was part of a compensation package the community agreed with oil companies operating in their territory. Valeria Guarneros-Meza and Marcela Torres-Wong illustrate in their chapter that infrastructure linked to extractive industries has disciplining and biopolitical dimensions, with local authorities and mining firms in Mexico using practices and discourses that promoted highly circumscribed forms of participation and citizenship. Meanwhile, in the chapter by Yuri Gama we see how the rationalities of 20th-century Brazilian politicians, bureaucrats, and planners were instilled in state housing projects and new forms of citizenship and living were promoted through this infrastructure.

Gama’s analysis of housing in Natal, Brazil shows it is not only Latin American governments that have attempted to forge modern Latin American subjects through infrastructure. Planners, engineers, architects, politicians, and bureaucrats from the United States were heavily involved in the construction of this housing, especially through the Alliance for Progress, launched in 1961 by the Kennedy government to counter the spread of communism in Latin America (see also Healey, 2020). Housing in Natal not only provided a habitat for workers but also promoted economic rationality and financial discipline, helping to embed capitalist relations and practices. The Soviet Union was not absent from this process of subject-making during the Cold War, as the chapter by Nicole Fadellin demonstrates. Her analysis of literary and theatrical representations of a nuclear energy plant in Cuba shows how Fidel Castro drew on Russian technology, knowledge, labour, and finance to cultivate modern revolutionary subjects.

Cuba’s nuclear dream – which took shape through the so-called ‘Project of the Century’ – shows infrastructure has a ‘state effect’ (Harvey, 2005), giving the state form and proximity through its material visibility. The separation of the form from its function in this manner gives infrastructure what Larkin (2013, p. 329) calls a ‘poetic quality’, through which the state represents itself to its citizens. The poetics of infrastructure mean that a state’s effects are intimately related to its affects. This is because ‘any social project that is not imposed by force alone must be affective in order to be effective’ (Mazzarella, 2009, p. 299; see also Amin, 2014; von Schnitzler, 2016). Indeed, the state and infrastructure are often conflated and the regard in which citizens hold the state is shaped by the mediating force of infrastructure. The longing for infrastructure such as roads ‘is intimately connected to the perilous state of contemporary provision’ (Harvey, 2018, p. 82), and this is often felt as state neglect or abandonment. Ursula Balderson’s chapter shows a desire for water infrastructure in Mataquita, Peru, experienced as emotional suffering, to emerge out of, and stored within, intertwined desires for infrastructure and rights as citizens. Here intangible aspects of the social environment influenced the design of water infrastructure at the site. Or, as Diego Valdivieso shows in his ethnographic study in Quehui Island, Chile, citizens demand the greater presence of an absent state and this presence is felt through the construction of a new municipal building and other infrastructures.

The case of Quehui Island shows that infrastructures are key to building and maintaining Latin American nations and make visible ‘the oscillating margins of the state’ (Harvey, 2014, p. 281; see also Hetherington and Campbell, 2014). Infrastructure provision can be a useful governmental strategy in areas where the territorial reach of the state is in doubt or being challenged. In her chapter, Clara Voyvodic argues that in Colombia infrastructure has been weaponised as a means to assert territorial authority by both the state and armed rebel groups. By constructing infrastructure projects, the state provides something that armed groups often cannot. Hence, infrastructure has been used as a counter-insurgency and state-consolidation strategy in Colombia. However, groups like the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) have been able to assert their own authority by subverting, capturing and, modifying state infrastructures. Thus, while the construction and operation of infrastructure demonstrates the power of the state, the only response of non-state armed groups is not to destroy it. In fact, Voyvodic’s analysis shows that these infrastructures can support the application of authority and power of armed groups who use them to challenge the state’s monopoly on violence (see also Peñarranda Currie et al., 2021). She also demonstrates that the relationship between the state and non-state armed groups can be complementary, with paramilitary organisations aligned to the government heavily involved in the protection and development of state infrastructures in Colombia.

Development, promise, progress

One of the most powerful characteristics of infrastructure is its potential to transform time and space: ‘Once we conceptualize infrastructures not just in term of the different places that they connect, but as spatiotemporal projects – as chronotopes – then we can open up new ways of thinking about the temporality and spatiality of infrastructure’ (Appel et al., 2018, p. 17). The promise of infrastructure lies in its power to transform, acting in the present as a (perhaps literal) bridge to the future. Infrastructure often creates a sense of modernity (Larkin, 2013, p. 337), which itself has the power to transform its users into modern citizens. Indeed, it is precisely to project themselves and their citizens as advanced and modern that many nation states build infrastructure, rather than necessarily to meet a felt need (Appel et al., 2018, p. 19). Efforts to shape the present and future through infrastructure are therefore never politically neutral. Rather, as Gupta (2018, p. 66) argues: ‘Infrastructures are important because the future they bring about always favours one set of political actors over others.’

When viewing state-sponsored infrastructures as chrono-political projects, it is significant that in the Latin American context infrastructure projects are tightly bound to the notion of ‘development’ (Escobar, 1995/2012; Hetherington, 2014; Harvey et al., 2017; Purcell, 2020). Since the late 20th century, as previously noted, Latin American societies have become increasingly urban, but even as rural to urban migration has increased, social inequalities remain rooted in coloniality (Quijano, 2008). Peri-urban and rural dwellers, who are often indigenous, are still commonly projected as civilisationally inferior and backward by their urban middle- and upper-class counterparts (Alderman, 2022). Infrastructure projects as development are bound with chrono-political objectives to modernise citizens living at the periphery of the state by creating the ‘material, social, and ideational conditions that configure lifeworlds’ (Harvey, 2014, p. 283). Escobar (2003, p. 61) argues that the effect of development can therefore be to alienate those being developed from their own social reality. Several chapters in this book highlight this as a real concern among many people directly affected by infrastructure construction. Yet they also show that infrastructures are sometimes welcomed precisely for their transformative, modernising qualities. We see in Dayot’s chapter, for example, that while most community members refuse to pay for water supplied through a new water plant, they all embrace the new infrastructure, and no one wants to go back to drinking water from the river, which has been heavily polluted through oil production and upstream activities. Her chapter shows that infrastructure is not only necessary to support capitalist development but also to make human life possible in the wake of the socio-environmental destruction it generates.

Contributors to this volume also show that Latin Americans excluded from modernising infrastructure do not passively wait for the state or private firms to incorporate them. In Nicolás Valenzuela-Levi’s chapter, for example, we see how Chileans who lack internet coverage in Santiago have found innovative ways to connect to the network and develop digitised relations and practices, despite being abandoned by multinational corporations and state regulators. The response of residents living in low-income neighbourhoods to being excluded from internet services is to subvert the capitalist logic of private enterprise through innovative collective initiatives, which share internet around the neighbourhood (see also Humeres, 2021). New subjectivities have emerged through this collective process, creating space for alternative forms of political action in the city.

While state-sponsored infrastructure often has modernising, future-oriented, perspectives, it can project backward as well as forward and political conflicts can emerge over how to (re)construct the past as well as the future (de Sousa Santos, 2019). In Rumé’s chapter we see that the tram in Cuenca, Ecuador, took on several temporal identities from ‘picturesque heritage object’ to ‘cutting edge technology’, with each identity projecting alternative visions of the past and future. His analysis shows that Cuenca itself had to be reconfigured in order to meet the requirements of the tram; that is, through its tram design, the city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was forced to redesign itself. This involved the destruction of historic stone brick roads, which stoked tensions as some cuencanos felt the history of their city was being swept aside to make way for the modern tram network. Delays in constructing the tram network added further chrono-political tensions as for several years Cuenca was stuck in a chaotic liminal state between its past and future.

Community-constructed and managed infrastructure also has the potential to connect the present with the past. Larkin (2013, p. 329) argues that infrastructures, as ‘objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate’ are not just things, but ‘also the relation between things’. This can extend, as Sarah Bennison shows in her ethno-historical analysis in Peru, to relationships between the ‘living’ and the ‘dead’. In her chapter, we see how ancestors communicate with living community members on the correct way of performing irrigation canal maintenance rituals through khipus, knotted record-keeping instruments, which are rooted in Andean pre-colonial history. Indeed, the ancestors are themselves understood as the owners of the canals. The engagement of the youth with urban centres through road infrastructure, constructed in the 1920s, and the migration of many, had knock-on effects for the maintenance of community-constructed infrastructure, the irrigation canals. It also had profound implications for the identity of the community of San Pedro de Casta (Huarochirí, Lima) itself, whose relations with canal-dwelling ancestors are maintained and expressed through the canal-cleaning ritual. Considering the infrastructure in her case study as a ‘temporal intermediary’, Bennison cautions us to consider the fact that ‘infrastructures do not only function to communicate and transport goods or information between people, but also with non-human and/or formerly human actors’. Infrastructure therefore not only has the capacity to bring life (biopolitics – Foucault, 2008) or accelerate death (necropolitics – Mbembe, 2019) but to disrupt relations between the living and the dead and alter the practices and subjectivities embedded in these relations.

How affected communities relate to infrastructure may be determined by their collective identities, forged through history, as the above case illustrates. Infrastructure is shown to distort the relationship between two communities at the centre of the chapter by Guarneros-Meza and Torres-Wong. The right to decide whether mining should take place overlaps with a territorial dispute. How each community responds to the mine is in direct proportion to their own historical and spatial identities. One community owed its very existence to the discovery of a mine in 1776; meanwhile, its neighbour’s anti-mining stance drew on traditions of indigenous decision-making, hybridised with state-institutions.

This shows that what constitutes progress for some might represent deterioration for others. Infrastructure can have the effect of squeezing space and pushing together people previously kept apart. When a teleférico (cable car) was built connecting the middle-class areas of the zona sur of the city of La Paz with the popular neighbourhoods of the city of El Alto above, the residents of some of La Paz’s most expensive and exclusive neighbourhoods were horrified to find that this led to spaces such as the local multiplex cinema being ‘invaded’ by working-class Aymaras from the city above (Maclean, 2018). Hence, class and race relations and discrimination sometimes undermine the promise of infrastructure to connect and unite people, especially in highly unequal and spatially segregated Latin American cities.

Disappointment, failure, decay

Promises often go unfulfilled. And a promise made, once broken, can lead to greater disappointment than if it had never been made at all. Infrastructures may fail or break down either due to internal disruption or because of a breakdown between the infrastructure and the domain of relations it is supposed to sustain, or that are required to sustain it. In fact, the complexity and fragility of infrastructure means that it might be best to think of it as functioning ‘against the odds’ (Harvey et al., 2017, p. 12). However, as Velho and Ureta (2019, p. 433) point out, disrepair does not necessarily mean that infrastructure is moribund, because a great deal of Latin American infrastructure effectively exists ‘in a state of partial disrepair and partial functionality’.

In Fadellin’s chapter, the ‘Cuban nuclear dream’, which was becoming physically realised through the Nuclear City, inhabited by engineers who had devoted their lives to the project, comes to a halt because of circumstances beyond the control of the actors directly involved: the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union. When the dream of being thrust forward into the future by nuclear power becomes unrealisable, those living in the Nuclear City are left instead in suspended animation. Dreams of progress and development were replaced by decay as crumbling nuclear infrastructure reflected a growing sense of economic crisis and political impasse. Ruination became ‘a lived condition’ (Velho and Ureta, 2019, p. 436, see also Gupta, 2018).

In Rumé’s chapter, promise turns not just to disappointment but to apprehension and preoccupation as it becomes clear that it is not possible to create the tram in Cuenca, Ecuador according to the original specifications envisaged. In this case, the (long-term) temporality of infrastructure collides with the (short-term) temporality of the political. The projections for the design and functioning of the tram seemed to fit electoral objectives, projecting voters’ desires into an imagined reality. However, when the form of infrastructural reality is revealed as different from that promised this had consequences for the relationship between the governing and the governed. Rumé argues that the state ‘is seen through the same processual lens as its infrastructure projects. The uncertainty of the outcomes of infrastructure projects thus goes hand in hand with the uncertainty of the state effect, a failing infrastructure being likely to expose the flaws of the responsible entities and thereby damage their relationship with those to be governed’.

The disappointment of infrastructure can also be experienced through a longing unfulfilled. The islanders of Quehui, Chile, experience the distant state through an idealised projection, as caring, and yet paradoxically also as neglectful and inconvenient. This is because of the fundamental role played by intermittent mobility infrastructure over many years. Valdivieso suggests that a change in the affective relationship occurs when state presence becomes more permanent on the island, through the construction of municipal offices.

The members of the communities in the Peruvian Andes at the heart of Balderson’s chapter also experienced disappointment through their negotiations with the Canadian mining company, Barrick Gold. Their collective efforts to overcome water scarcity through the construction of water storage reservoirs were frustrated by the firm’s refusal to recognise the problems caused by its operations and the water rights of the communities. Balderson recounts: ‘The community wanted as much water storage capacity to be built as possible partly to alleviate the water crisis but also as the material presence of reservoirs in the village served as visible indicators of the community’s social worth.’ Yet the mining firm refused to cede to the community’s demands, proposing to build one reservoir instead of five, despite the considerable income it was generating from the mine and ruination of the environment (see also Damonte et al, 2022).

In the above case, the community’s own labour power was used to construct the infrastructure that emerged out of the dispute. Collective labour power of Latin American communities has not only been mobilised to overcome disappointment but also to prevent failure and decay and build alternative futures (Holston, 2008; Amin, 2014; Massidda, 2018, 2021). In Ecuador, for example, the collective labour practice, the minga, has played a pivotal role in maintaining and repairing hydraulic infrastructure, especially in rural Andean communities (Boelens and Vos, 2014; Goodwin 2019, 2021; Manosalvas et al., 2021). New relations and subjectivities have emerged through these diverse processes, showing that the limitations and fragility of infrastructure can be generative as well as disruptive.

Conclusion

In this introductory chapter, we have argued that infrastructure can be fruitfully understood as a relational and experimental process. The authors included in this volume approach infrastructure from distinct theoretical and methodological perspectives but their analysis offers broad support for this conceptual approach and provides important new insights into the cross-disciplinary infrastructure scholarship. We have identified three themes that connect the chapters to this literature: i) nation, state, citizenship ii) development, promise, progress iii) disappointment, failure, decay.

In shining new light on these issues, the book also provides new perspectives on Latin American history, society, and politics. The three themes that we have identified cross-cut Latin America, revealing certain specificities in the relationship that Latin Americans have with infrastructure and with their states through infrastructure. To understand the social and political life of Latin American infrastructures we must consider infrastructure’s historical role as a tool of colonial-capitalist states, first to facilitate extraction of local resources, often out of the continent altogether, to very little benefit of local populations, and second as a method of reshaping societies and environments, creating highly differentiated forms of citizenship, and forging nation states. These legacies continue to weigh heavily on Latin America, and infrastructure remains at the heart of contested processes of capitalist development across the region.

In Latin American societies, which are marked by deep racial and ethnic division and considerable social and class stratification, state infrastructure projects often, if certainly not always, reinforce existing inequalities. Projects designed to propel local populations forward into the future inevitably follow designs of the more powerful in society, resulting in Latin American development reproducing the visions of elites, politicians, and bureaucrats, that often take their cue from North America and Western Europe, rather than a vision from below of what Latin American infrastructure should look like and the purposes it should serve. The conversion of infrastructure into a global asset class through financialisation has strengthened these tendencies as much infrastructure today is primarily designed to meet the needs of international investors instead of infrastructure users.

Yet infrastructures have not only served the interests of states and capital, they have also provided a foundation for Latin Americans to contest capitalist development and forge new forms of citizenship and politics. Infrastructures always produce excess, something that is not captured in the designs and visions of politicians, planners, and engineers, but emerges once infrastructures come into contact with the human and non-human world, generating diverse effects, which extend across space and time. The protests that erupted across Latin America as the 2010s drew to a close show that the social and political life of infrastructures take unexpected twists and turns and these are only likely to multiply as Latin American societies step into the unknown of their post-pandemic futures.

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